Chapter 30

A CENTURY OF MINOR BRITISH WARS

(1815-1914)

During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War against the Germans the Royal Navy had no more fights for life or death. But it never ceased to protect the Empire it had done so much to make. It took part in many wars; it prevented many others; it helped to spread law and justice in the world; and, at the end of all this, it was as ready as ever to meet the foe.

Sometimes it acted alone; but much oftener with the Army in joint expeditions, as it had for centuries. And here let us remind ourselves again that the Navy by itself could no more have made the Empire than the Army could alone. The United Service of both was needed for such work in the past, just as the United Service of these and of the Royal Air Force will be needed to defend the Empire in the future. Nor is this all we must remember; for the fighting Services draw their own strength from the strength of the whole people. So, whenever we talk of how this great empire of the free was won and is to be defended, let us never forget that it needed and it needs the patriotic service of every man and woman, boy and girl, whether in the fighting Services by sea and land and air or among those remaining quietly at home. One for all, and all for one.

The Navy's first work after the peace of 1815 was to destroy the stronghold of the Dey of Algiers, who was a tyrant, enslaver, and pirate in one. This released thousands of Christian slaves and broke up Algerian slavery for ever. A few years later (1827) the French and British fleets, now happily allied, sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino, because the Sultan was threatening to kill off the Greeks. Then the Navy sent the Pasha of Egypt fleeing out of Beirut and Acre in Syria, closed in on Alexandria, and forced him to stop bullying the people of the whole Near East.

By this time (1840) steam had begun to be used in British men-of-war. But the first steamer in the world that ever fired a shot in action, and the first to cross any ocean under steam the whole way, was built at Quebec in 1831. This was the famous _Royal William_, which steamed from Pictou (in Nova Scotia) to London in 1833, and which, on the 5th of May, 1836, in the Bay of San Sebastian, fired the first shot ever fired in battle from a warship under steam. She had been sold to the Spanish Government for use against the Carlists, who were the same sort of curse to Spain that the Stuarts were to Britain, and was then leading the British Auxiliary Steam Squadron under Commodore Henry. (The American _Savannah_ is often said to have crossed the Atlantic under steam in 1819. But her log (ship's diary) proves that she steamed only eighty hours during her voyage of a month.)

In 1854 French and British were again allied, this time against Russia, which wanted to cut Europe off from Asia by taking Constantinople. The Allies took Sebastopol in the Crimea because it was the Russian naval base in the Black Sea. The Czar never thought that "bleeding his big toe" could beat him. But it did. He had to supply his army by land, while the Allies supplied theirs by sea; and though theirs fought thousands of miles from their bases at home, while his fought in Russia itself, within a few hundred miles of its bases inland, yet their sea-power wore out his land-power in less than two years.

Russia was at that time a great world-power, stretching without a break from the Baltic to Alaska, which she owned. What, then, kept Canada free from the slightest touch of war? The only answer is, the Royal Navy, that Navy which, supported by the Mother Country alone, enabled all the oversea Dominions to grow in perfect peace and safety for this whole hundred years of British wars. Moreover, Canada was then, and long remained, one of the greatest shipping countries in the world, dependent on her own and the Mother Country's shipping for her very life. What made her shipping safe on every sea? The Royal Navy. But, more than even this, the Mother Country spent twenty-five hundred millions of her own money on keeping Canada Canadian and British by land and sea. And here, again, nothing could have been done without the Navy.

The Navy enabled the Mother Country to put down the Indian Mutiny, a mutiny which, if it had succeeded, would have thrown India back a thousand years, into the welter of her age-long wars; and these wars themselves would soon have snuffed out all the "Pacifist" Indian Nationalists who bite the British hand that feeds them, though they want Britain to do all the paying and fighting of Indian defence. The Navy enabled the Mother Country to save Egypt from ruin at home, from the ruthless sword of the Mahdi in the Soudan, and from conquest by the Germans or the Turks. The Navy also enabled the Mother Country to change a dozen savage lands into places where people could rise above the level of their former savage lives.

All this meant war. But if these countries had not been brought into the British Empire they could only have had the choice of two evils--either to have remained lands of blood and savagery or to have been bullied by the Germans. And if the British do not make friends of those they conquer, how is it that so many Natives fought for them without being in any way forced to do so, and how is it that the same Boer commander-in-chief who fought against the British in the Boer War led a Boer army on the British side against the Germans? The fact is that all the white man's countries of the British Empire overseas are perfectly free commonwealths in which not only those of British blood but those of foreign origin, like Boers and French-Canadians, can live their lives in their own way, without the Mother Country's having the slightest wish or power to force them to give a ship, a dollar, or a man to defend the Empire without which they could not live a day. She protects them for nothing. They join her or not, just as they please. And when they do join her, her Navy is always ready to take their soldiers safe across the sea. No League of Nations could ever better this.

Nor is this the only kind of freedom that flourishes under the White Ensign of the Navy. The oversea Dominions, which govern themselves, make what laws they please about their trade, even to charging duty on goods imported from the Mother Country. But the parts of the Empire which the Mother Country has to rule, (because their people, not being whites, have not yet learnt to rule themselves), also enjoy a wonderful amount of freedom in trade. And foreigners enjoy it too; for they are allowed to trade with the Natives as freely as the British are themselves. Nor is this all. During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War most of the oversea colonies of Holland, Spain, and Portugal could have easily been taken by British joint expeditions. But not one of them was touched.

There never was the slightest doubt that the Navy's long arm could reach all round the Seven Seas. When the Emperor of Abyssinia imprisoned British subjects wrongly and would not let them go, the Navy soon took an army to the east coast of Africa and kept it supplied till it had marched inland, over the mountains, and brought the prisoners back. When the Chinese Mandarins treated a signed agreement like a "scrap of paper" (as the Germans treated the neutrality of Belgium) they presently found a hundred and seventy-three British vessels coming to know the reason why, though the Chinese coast was sixteen thousand miles from England. No, there is no question about the Navy's strong right arm. But it has no thievish fingers.

The Empire has grown by trade rather than by conquest. There have been conquests, plenty of them. But they have been brought on either by the fact that other Powers have tried to shut us out of whole continents, as the Spaniards tried in North and South America, or by fair war, as with the French, or by barbarians and savages who would not treat properly the British merchants with whom they had been very glad to trade. Of course there have been mistakes, and British wrongs as well as British rights. But ask the conquered how they could live their own lives so much in their own way under a flag of their own and without the safeguard of the Royal Navy.

These things being so, the Empire, which is itself the first real League of Nations the world has ever seen, would be wrong to give up any of the countries it holds in trust for their inhabitants; and its enormous size is more a blessing than a curse. The size itself is more than we can quite take in till we measure it by something else we know as being very large indeed. India, for instance, has three times as many people as there are in the whole of the United States; though India is only one of the many countries under the British Crown. So much for population. Now for area. The area added to the British Empire in the last fifty years is larger than that of the whole United States. Yet we don't hear much about it. That is not the British way. The Navy is "The Silent Service."